Drawing The Wrong Conclusion Again...

 

In preparation for interviewing Pussy Riot’s Maria “Masha” Alyokhina at the Charleston festival, I was reading her new memoir, Political Girl. I thought I remembered the group’s origin story pretty well – in 2012, they performed their anthem, Punk Prayer (Virgin Mary Banish Putin), and two band members were imprisoned for two years in a penal colony, then released slightly early in order to sanitise the country’s reputation before the Sochi Olympics in 2014.

Oh, Russia, awful country where you aren't free to say what you think, eh Zoe?  

The detention of Pussy Riot signalled a significant shift towards the aggressive authoritarianism that is now self-evident, and, in those early days, was expressed and mobilised through misogynistic, patriarchal values-setting built on Christian nationalist foundations.

Say, isn’t there a religion with all those hallmarks that's not Christian, Zoe? I'm sure there is.

Far-right movement-building always includes, and very often starts with, the repression of women. The obvious jumping-off point is reproductive rights, since that’s easily the most effective: a woman who can’t control when and whether to have children isn’t in control of anything.

Funny you should mention repression of women, Zoe…. 

This is why Reform’s Makerfield candidate, Robert Kenyon – surprise, surprise – allegedly has been both anti-abortion and toxically misogynistic on social media and this, crucially, is why Reform’s high command has said explicitly that it has no plans to censure or investigate him.

Reform may not be the answer in the end, but their refusal to play along with the fake concerns from the progressives and censor themselves will get them my vote every time! And focusing on Christians is like shrieking in terror at seeing a grass snake in the garden, while importing black mambas into the neighbourhood.

Again, liberal arguments go in on exactly the wrong pressure point, trying to make it make sense – why, when women constitute so very much of the electorate, would any politician set out to alienate us? We know, from any democracy on Earth that has thrown up a far-right victor, that women don’t vote en masse in the interests of their gender; that some are as susceptible to the politics of domination as some men are. Yet we try to rationalise it on our own terms, and treat misogyny simultaneously like a side dish to the meat of a policy platform, and like a mistake so self-evident that people can be argued out of it.

Now who is making 'a mistake so self-evident'? And if you've failed to notice the elephant in the room marked 'Islam' in this column, I don't feel like wasting time trying to argue you out of ir, I'll just point and laugh instead.

Doesn't Sound As If It's Working

...you seem pretty loony still.

I need retail therapy, because Veganuary has become quite muted and that’s part of a wider inflection point in vegan eating that I’m sad about. “Where have all the vegans gone?” Dazed asked in November (Ed: Admit it Reader, you sang that in your head, didn't you?), and now New York Magazine has investigated, with the tagline: “Plant-based eating was supposed to be the future. Then meat came roaring back.” It details a wave of vegan restaurant closures (plus the high-profile reverse ferret performed by formerly vegan Michelin-three-starred Eleven Madison Park to serving “animal products for certain dishes”), declining sales of meat substitutes and a stubbornly static percentage of people identifying as vegan (around 1%). It’s not new (rumours of veganism’s demise have been swirling around since at least 2024) and it’s not just a US phenomenon; many UK vegan restaurants have closed this year, including my lovely local.

The world is healing! What could possibly account for this? It can't just be people coming to their senses and rejecting a fad, can it?

What’s going on? For a start, the Trump 2.0 “roaring” meat revival. As the New York Times reported last year, meat sales are up and fewer Americans are interested in curbing their intake. That movement feels partly provocative – an in-your-face rejection of woke orthodoxies around cutting your carbon footprint, consuming mindfully, or, generally, caring.

Yes,  Emma, Chad and Martha from Stallion's Tackle, Arkansas aren't chowing down on a juicy steak at their local diner because they want to, they are doing it purely to stick a thumb in the eye of progressive loons like you. They'd rather be having a mushroom cassarolr instead.

Is there some pychiatric term for people who think this way? 

Oh, yes - narcissists.

I wonder, though, if other things are happening. I’m concerned that we have reached the “shrug and give up” stage of trying to combat climate breakdown and that’s also why fewer people are vegan. People are starting to think it’s too late, so why bother – they might as well be hung for a lamb chop. Plus, on climate, there’s a good argument that what individuals can achieve is exceptionally limited and that making us feel responsible is a cynical trick. Why am I diligently washing out coconut kefir bottles to recycle, when half the world’s climate-heating emissions come from the products of 36 fossil fuel companies?

And that big glowing ball in the sky? You don't think that might have a bigger effect on our planet's temperature and climate? 

More broadly, I don’t think I’ll surprise anyone by venturing that the world feels tremendously, terrifyingly bad right now. People need the odd little treat to face – and keep facing – the horrors. Is it so wrong, relatively speaking, to carpe diem and butter yourself a crumpet now and then? Of course not. All I can say to that, really, is if you’re interested in feeling good – and who isn’t? – it feels good to actually do something. My veganism is basically self-interest, by which I mean, I do it for my health: not physical, but mental.

It doesn't seem to be working, so maybe you should try a beefburger, Emma.